EFF Transition Memo to Trump Administration 2025

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development.

We work to ensure that rights, freedoms, and innovation are enhanced and protected as our use of technology grows. We hope to work with you on a wide range of policies that affect digital rights in the coming years.

As our technology becomes cheaper and faster, smaller and more wearable, our activities, our location, and even our otherwise private conversations have all become more available to scrutiny at all levels of government. Additionally, private companies collect more and more data—search history, location, purchase history, content of unencrypted conversations, and more—and frequently make that data available to the government, often without being legally required to do so. Law enforcement and the intelligence community continue to insist that such broad collection and access to data do not affect privacy and civil liberties.

Those same entities then fight any limitation on their use of this data, on the theory that the data was “legally collected.” This Catch-22 approach results in a system that no longer meets traditional Fourth Amendment requirements. This trend needs to be reversed.1

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